If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive. ~ Samuel Goldwyn

The Road Erin Travels

Erin and her friends went to the beach last night. They do that a lot… spur of the moment… it’s the thing she loves about living in southern California. Then they decided to go over to one friend’s house and share a fifth of some dumb flavored vodka. Well… you know… as things progress in such situations… someone says, “Hey! Let’s go for a drive!” Erin has never been one to ride in a car with a driver who has been drinking… well I mean, unless it’s her mother. And peers have rarely been effective in pressuring her to do anything she didn’t want to. So, she refused the ride. The driver begged and begged, promising that she would be safe. Even got down on his knees. Erin, being the sweet, sweet girl she is, was sorely tempted, but still said “no, thanks.” So there she was, sitting by herself at the house, while they went out for a joy ride. Next thing you know, she’s getting a call. “Erin! We’ve been in an accident! We’re running from the cops… we left the car and we need someone to pick us up!” The one guy who lived there who had a car was asleep in his bedroom. He had to work early in the morning. If you’ve ever had to wake up a sleeping twenty-year old man (and I use that term loosely), you know it’s no easy task. Even if you are a beautiful girl, whose heart he strongly desires. But Erin gave it a try… first gently shaking him… then throttling him… she was undaunted… he had to wake up! Finally, after he’d called her several names in the book, he was alert enough to hear the urgency of the situation. At that moment, another friend of theirs (Cory) who had decided to come over and keep Erin company showed up. So Justin (his name is Justin… the one after Erin’s heart) was off the hook to go back to sleep. Cory and Erin drove around for two hours, with the renegades calling every ten minutes or so to tell them their new location. When they finally connected with the group, they were running full force toward them, in the middle of the road, so covered with dirt, all you could see was the whites of their eyes. She said they looked like crazed soldiers, using ground cover to camouflage their presence! They had cuts and bruises from scaling barbed-wire fences and throwing themselves into any nearby foliage when a car drove by. Apparently, they had not been hurt when they rolled and totaled the car, but were reprimanded by nature in their fleeing. Of course, the police caught up with them and saw right through their “hey I didn’t even have my car tonight… it must have been stolen” story. And Erin… happy she is that she didn’t fall for the well-intentioned promise… “Nothing will happen to you… you will be perfectly safe.” Words to RUN by.